August 10 is the birthday of Ward Moore (1903-1978). Moore isn’t well remebered today. He only wroote or co-wrote four novels, two of them collaborations. One, Bring the Jubilee, is highly regarded as one of the first, and some say one of the best, alternate history novels in which the South won the Civil War. I have no opinion on it since I haven’t read it.
He never had a collection, which is a shame, because he was one of those writers who, while not being a top-tier author, could write a solid story. The ISFDB lists twenty-eight piecies of short fiction by him, the most recent in 2024 in Last Dangerous Visions. A collection of all his short fiction sounds like a project for NESFA.
But I digress.
Aside from Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore is best known as the author of “Lot” and its less well-known sequel, “Lot’s Daughter”.
“Lot” was published in the May 1953 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I’m not sure this story could be published today, as you’ll see below.
It’s a post-apocalypic riff on the Biblical story of Lot.
For those of you who might not be familiar with the story in Genesis 19, when God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, two angels send Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family out of the city of Sodom before it is destroyed. Lot’s wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. Lot and his two two daughters escape to a cave in the mountains. Because they have no husbands, the daughters get Lot drunk and sleep with him. Yes, they each get pregnant.
Version 1.0.0
I think you get the idea what happens in the story. A man has made plans to escape when there is a nuclear war. (I think. I read the story forty years ago and haven’t read it since.) Anyway, there’s some type of civilization catastrophe. The man decides his wife and son will be liabilities, so he leaves then along the way, taking only his daughter. I think she was a preteen in the story. That’s where the story ends. The impact and horror of the story is the implication of what is going to happen after the story ends.
He gets what he had coming to him in the sequel (also published in F&SF in the October issue of 1954), which is set a number of years later when his daughter is grown.
Both stories are available in a single ebook.
F&SF published some boundary-pushing stories in the fifties.